The Hebrews had none of the Hellenic instinct for simplicity and grace and directness. They delighted in deep symbolism and parable, in thunder and lightning of diction and imagery, in pomp and state and grandeur. They felt no scruples about going beyond the golden mean. With them all art of writing or creating was but means to an end, and not an end in itself. Let any one read the Bible and observe its unqualified figures of speech--how the hills skip and the floods clap their hands--and then let them ponder this Hellenic criticism of Longinus: "AEschylus, with a strange violence of language, represents the palace of Lycurgus as 'possessed' at the appearance of Dionysus: '_The hills with rapture thrill, the roof's inspired._' Here Euripides, in borrowing the image, softens its extravagance: _and all the mountain felt the God_.'" The Hellene, you observe, is not to let his intellect lose control over his imagination; the Hebrew wholly abandons his imagination to his master passion. This, you may say, is merely the difference between being inspired and not being inspired; and it may be urged that Plato himself puts the Greek conception otherwise: "All good poets compose their beautiful poems, not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed ... for the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired. When he has not attained to this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak of the actions which they record, but they do not speak of them by any rules of art, they are inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels them, and that only." All of which is true enough, but what it amounts to is this--that artistic rules cannot invent the poetic thought and utterance; it does not mean that the inventing Muse ever ignores the rules of art. And, as a matter of fact, there never is, in Hellenic poetry, anything of utter abandonment. There is reason, warmed and coloured by sentiment and imagination, but reason is never imperilled by any conflagration of emotion.